2022 Will Be the Year of Mobile – SMS is Back.
At the beginning of every year, the pundits roll out their predictions for marketing and technology trends. Since 1999, those lists have proclaimed that … This will be the year of mobile.
In 1999 it was SMS and a few years later it was WAP. Then it went away for a bit until the iPhone was launched in 2007 and it’s been apps ever since…
Apple certainly changed the mobile marketing landscape back then, and the company’s behaviour is affecting it again, at least in the US where SMS never really took off the first time.
The reason that some marketing people are taking another look at SMS is because of recent changes to the way email is delivered and tracked on iOS devices. Apple really doesn’t want people to get personalised marketing. Marketing people can no longer optimise email based on information such as whether or not an email was opened.
Just as an aside – this is only a problem for marketing people who are sophisticated enough to use this data. I still get emails from organisations that I haven’t opened an email from for years.
So now some young US marketing people, who can’t use email the way they want, are turning to SMS and learning some of the lessons that others learned 20 years ago.
Text messages delivered to someone’s mobile can be a powerful tool. Response rates for SMS are typically higher than email, but there are a lot of ways that SMS is different and in other countries, marketing people have abused the technology to a point where it is useless. (The image for this post is an actual screenshot from my UAE phone)
So… for marketing people who are doing SMS for the first time in 20 years, here are some lessons from the past.
DO
- Get permission from your customer to contact them by SMS. Somebody giving you their number as a contact for delivery purposes is not an opt-in to receive promotions.
- Remember that someone’s phone is a very personal space and you are using it to advertise to them. Be respectful of the space.
- Think about context and the customer experience. Consider the time when the message arrives on someone’s phone. As SMS is used as an emergency and alert tool, getting an SMS promotion at 6am might not have the response you want.
- Use timing to your advantage. Time specific or limited promotions are more relevant and therefore have better results if used in a smart way. Where is your customer in their journey? Is it morning? Lunchtime? A holiday? What was their last interaction with you? Positive? Negative?
- Understand that you are not the only organisation texting a phone. In many places SMS is a broken channel because customers recieve 20 or 30 messages from brands per day. The same spamming rules that apply to email apply more to SMS.
SMS For Ecommerce
There are a lot of user cases for SMS in the ecommerce customer experience. Many companies use SMS to update customers about deliveries, but some are also using text messages for alerts where they used to use email – like abandoned cart.
There are thousands of creative ways to use SMS – from flash sales to bot functions that run surveys. Just keep in mind that marketing people have broken most messaging channels through misuse and overuse. So keep that in mind.
